Plus size Twitter is on fire right now, and it’s awesome. Debz of The (Not So) Secret Dairy of a Wannabe Princess started a hashtag in response to comments that a British pop musician, Jamila, recently made on a talk show called Loose Women.

Jamila said that women who wear smaller than a size 6 (2/4 in US sizing) or larger than a 22 (18/20 US) shouldn’t be able to buy clothing in regular stores, because “they” should be made to feel uncomfortable. So plus size folks are taking to social media to point out that “they” aren’t some faceless group, but real, living, breathing, and often quite fabulous people. It’s wonderful to see so many members of the plus size/fatshion/fat acceptance/etc. communities affirming our humanity and supporting each other.

Check out the hashtag, and contribute if you want! The picture and caption above are from one my tweets. (The dress is from SimplyBe, and I’ll be posting a full outfit post soon.)

I am madly, madly in love with this music video, and I’ve had the song stuck in my head all week. If you want to help Gaymous make “the fat queer pervy dance EP of your dreams,” check out their IndieGoGo campaign!

I’m so, so sick of environmentalists using fat bodies as a shorthand for everything that’s wrong with the capitalist, earth-destroying, people-destroying system we live in. I’m so sick of seeing people who care deeply about the same things I do treating bodies like mine as a symptom (or sometimes even a cause) of everything that’s wrong with the world.

There have always been fat people–since long before cars, suburban sprawl, or WalMart were invented–and there always will be. There are fat people who live in cities and get around by walking and public transit (ahem…*raises hand*). There are thin people who live in exurbs and drive everywhere. Fatness is neither a moral failing nor a metaphor for the ills of late capitalism.

Critique the system, not people’s bodies.

Promote good urban design and walkability on their own merits, not by scaring people with the threat of–gasp!–becoming fat, as if fatness is some terrible thing.

Let me tell you, it isn’t.

I can’t even begin to describe how frustrated I am, how long I’ve watched sizeism crop up time and time again among people who can critique almost any other kind of oppression.

I wish I could shake the entire environmental movement and somehow get it through their heads: all bodies are good bodies. “Obesity” is not a disease. Weight =! health. Fat people don’t consume more resources than anyone else. Our bodies aren’t a symptom or a metaphor–they’re just our bodies. Fat people belong in the environmental movement too, and we’re sick of being treated as victims, oppressors, or scapegoats rather than comrades.

We can hear what you’re saying about us, and we’re sick of it. We’re especially sick of it because we can see what’s happening to our planet and its people, and it makes us heartsick and terrified. We’re fighting like hell against the forces of greed and destruction, and for a vision of a better world.

Even though I’m lucky in that I rarely encounter fat-shaming from people in my everyday life, I still see it in the culture all around me, and sometimes it just gets exhausting.

Here are three things I’ve seen or read lately that pissed me off, and my response: a fat-pos meme I made from a picture of an adorable chubby bunny that I saw at a town fair last fall.I have included the original picture at the end, so you can use it to make your own images and spread the cute-animal love.

1.) This “invitation to dialogue” about “obesity” in the New York Times. Warning: the letter is jam-packed with extreme fat-shaming; read at your own risk.

The Times invited its readers to respond, and said they’ll publish the responses in the Sunday Review. It’s great opportunity for educating people about fat acceptance and Health At Every Size; if I could have mustered the sanity points, I would have written my own response.

But even as I appreciate the opportunity for activism, I hate that we need it at all. I hate that the very existence of bodies like mine is up for referendum in our nation’s best-known newspaper. I hate that we keep being asked to prove that our bodies have the right to exist without shame or stigma. I wish people would just stop making assumptions about people based on how they look, and start understanding that all bodies are good bodies.

2.) This device, which the FDA is likely to approve, which curbs the appetite by sending electric shocks to the stomach.

As my friend Jessica commented when I posted the link on Facebook,”So wait…if you never feel ‘hungry,’ how are you supposed to know when to eat? Oh wait, I forgot, it’s more important to listen to society’s judgment than to listen to YOUR OWN BODY.”

3.) This sign, which I saw at a mini-golf/bumper boats/petting zoo place where I went for a friend’s birthday:

I read this piece by Roxane Gay with trepidation; I love her writing, but from following her for a while, I’ve seen she’s conflicted about fatness in a way that’s hard for me to read. She often critiques fat-shaming while still buying into the ideas that fat is unhealthy, that weight loss is good, that thinner is better….and so I try to skip over anything she writes about weight. But then I read her piece about the Biggest Loser anyway.

I’ve read plenty of great critiques of the show, but this one makes it personal. Gay writes about her own struggles with her relationship to her body:

My body is wildly undisciplined and I deny myself nearly everything I desire. I deny myself the right to space when I am public, trying to fold in on myself, to make my body invisible even though it is, in fact, grandly visible. I deny myself the right to a shared armrest because how dare I impose? I deny myself entry into certain spaces I have deemed inappropriate for a body like mine—most spaces inhabited by other people.

I deny myself bright colors in my clothing choices, sticking to a uniform of denim and dark shirts even though I have a far more diverse wardrobe. I deny myself certain trappings of femininity as if I do not have the right to such expression when my body does not follow society’s dictates for what a woman’s body should look like. I deny myself gentler kinds of affection—to touch or be kindly touched—as if that is a pleasure a body like mine does not deserve.

It’s just heart-breaking.

It’s heart-breaking that she can so eloquently describe the pain of fat-shaming, both external and internalized, but doesn’t seem to see that there’s a (hard, imperfect, messy, but very real) way out.

Body love, even body detente, isn’t always easy. It isn’t a linear journey. But it is a journey, one you can choose to take.

There are so many of us fat women–and men, and non-binary folks–over here, on the fat acceptance/fat justice/whatever-you-want-to-call-it-side, living our lives and treating our bodies as well as we can, whatever that means to each of us.

We’re here, having picnics and clothing swaps, dancing, painting our nails bright colors, wearing flowery dresses, practicing Health At Every Size, dating people who see the beauty in us, celebrating our undisciplined bodies and desires, refusing to buy into our culture’s twisted narratives about weight and health and worth.